Publication Ethics and Publication Malpractice Statement
Al-Athfal: Jurnal Pendidikan Anak is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal published by the Islamic Early Childhood Education Study Program, Faculty of Tarbiyah and Education, UIN Sunan Kalijaga Yogyakarta. This statement sets out the ethical standards expected of all parties involved in the publication process, including authors, editors, reviewers, and the publisher. The journal is committed to maintaining the integrity of the scholarly record and follows the principles of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
This statement applies to all stages of editorial management, peer review, publication, correction, retraction, and post-publication oversight.
Ethical Guideline for Journal Publication
The publication of an article in a peer-reviewed Al-Athfal: Jurnal Pendidikan Anak is an essential building block in developing a coherent and respected network of knowledge. It is a direct reflection of the quality of the authors' work and the institutions that support them. Peer-reviewed articles support and embody the scientific method. It is therefore important to agree upon standards of expected ethical behavior for all parties involved in the act of publishing: the authors, the journal editors, the peer reviewers, the publisher, and the society.
Islamic Early Childhood Education Study Program, Faculty of Tarbiyah and Education, UIN Sunan Kalijaga Yogyakarta, as the publisher of this Journal, takes its guardianship duties overall publishing stages extremely seriously. We recognize our ethical and other responsibilities. We are committed to ensuring that advertising, reprint, or other commercial revenue has no impact or influence on editorial decisions. Besides, Islamic Early Childhood Education Study Program, Faculty of Tarbiyah and Education, UIN Sunan Kalijaga Yogyakarta, and Editorial Board of Al-Athfal: Jurnal Pendidikan Anak will assist in communications with other journals and/or publishers is useful and necessary.
Duties of Editors
Publication Decisions
The Editor-in-Chief has full responsibility for deciding which manuscripts are accepted, rejected, or returned for revision. Editorial decisions are based on the manuscript’s academic merit, originality, relevance to the journal’s scope, methodological soundness, clarity of presentation, and reviewers’ recommendations. Editorial decisions are not influenced by commercial interests, advertising, sponsorship, or personal considerations.
Fairness and Non-Discrimination
Editors evaluate manuscripts solely on their intellectual and scholarly merit. Manuscripts are assessed without regard to the authors’ race, gender, age, religious belief, ethnic origin, nationality, citizenship, institutional affiliation, sexual orientation, or political philosophy.
Confidentiality
Editors and editorial staff must treat all submitted manuscripts as confidential documents. Information about a manuscript may be shared only with those directly involved in the editorial and review process, including the corresponding author, reviewers, editorial staff, and the publisher when necessary.
Conflicts of Interest
Editors must not use unpublished material disclosed in a submitted manuscript for their own research or personal advantage. Editors must recuse themselves from handling manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest resulting from personal relationships, academic collaboration, institutional affiliation, financial interests, or competitive considerations. In such cases, the manuscript will be reassigned to another editor with no relevant competing interests.
Ethical Oversight
Editors are responsible for taking reasonable steps to identify and prevent publication misconduct, including plagiarism, duplicate submission, data fabrication, data falsification, image manipulation, citation manipulation, authorship manipulation, and peer review manipulation. Editors will handle suspected misconduct in accordance with COPE guidance and the journal’s procedures.
Post-Publication Responsibility
Editors are responsible for ensuring that credible concerns about published content are addressed appropriately and in a timely manner. Where necessary, the journal will publish corrections, expressions of concern, editor’s notes, or retractions to maintain the integrity of the scholarly record.
Duties of Reviewers
Contribution to Editorial Decisions
The journal applies a double-blind peer review process. Reviewers assist editors by providing independent, constructive, and evidence-based evaluations of submitted manuscripts and by advising on editorial decisions.
Promptness
Reviewers who feel unqualified to review a manuscript, or who cannot provide a review within the requested time, should decline the invitation promptly so that alternative reviewers can be appointed.
Confidentiality
Reviewers must treat manuscripts received for review as confidential documents. They must not share, discuss, or use manuscript content outside the peer review process without explicit authorization from the editor.
Standards of Objectivity
Reviews should be conducted objectively, professionally, and respectfully. Reviewers should express their views clearly and support their assessments with scholarly arguments. Personal criticism of the author is inappropriate.
Acknowledgment of Sources
Reviewers should identify relevant published works that have not been cited by the authors and should alert the editor to substantial similarity or overlap between the manuscript under review and any other work of which they are aware.
Conflicts of Interest
Reviewers must decline to review manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest arising from personal, institutional, financial, collaborative, or competitive relationships with any of the authors or related institutions.
Duties of Authors
Reporting Standards
Authors must present an accurate, honest, and objective account of the research performed. The manuscript should contain sufficient detail and references to permit others to understand, evaluate, and, where appropriate, replicate the work. Knowingly false, fabricated, manipulated, or misleading statements constitute unethical behavior and are unacceptable.
Originality and Plagiarism
Authors must ensure that their submissions are original and that all sources are properly acknowledged. Plagiarism in any form, including unattributed copying, close paraphrasing, appropriation of others’ ideas, self-plagiarism, and redundant publication, is unacceptable. Proper quotation, citation, and attribution must be provided whenever the work of others is used. Before publication, each manuscript is subject to plagiarism screening by the editorial team using appropriate similarity-detection tools, including Turnitin, Crossref Similarity Check, and other relevant offline or online databases available to the journal, including databases maintained by the Faculty of Tarbiyah and Education, UIN Sunan Kalijaga Yogyakarta. Similarity reports are assessed as part of editorial judgment and are not interpreted mechanically. As a general threshold, manuscripts showing more than 15% similarity may be returned to the authors for clarification, correction, or revision before further consideration. Editorial decisions, however, are based not only on the percentage of similarity but also on the nature, location, and context of the overlap.
Duplicate, Redundant, or Concurrent Submission
Authors must not submit the same manuscript, or substantially similar manuscripts, to more than one journal simultaneously. Manuscripts previously published, under review elsewhere, or derived from substantially overlapping publications without proper disclosure are not acceptable.
Authorship and Contribution
Authorship must be limited to individuals who have made substantial scholarly contributions to the conception, design, execution, analysis, or interpretation of the study and to the drafting or revision of the manuscript. All listed authors must approve the final version and agree to its submission. Individuals who contributed to the work but do not meet the criteria for authorship should be acknowledged appropriately.
Any request to add, remove, or rearrange authors after submission must be explained in writing and approved by all authors. The journal may suspend editorial processing until the authorship issue is resolved.
Data Access and Retention
Authors may be asked to provide raw data, supporting files, research instruments, ethics approvals, or other relevant materials for editorial review. Authors should retain such materials for a reasonable period after publication and cooperate with reasonable requests for verification.
Disclosure of Conflicts of Interest
Authors must disclose any financial, institutional, personal, or other relationships that could be perceived to influence the research, analysis, interpretation, or publication of the work. All sources of financial support must be stated clearly in the manuscript.
Ethical Research Involving Human Participants or Animals
Research involving human participants must comply with relevant ethical and legal standards. Where applicable, authors must state that informed consent was obtained and that approval was granted by an appropriate ethics committee or institutional review board. For research involving children or other vulnerable populations, authors must ensure that ethical safeguards appropriate to the participants were observed, including parental or guardian consent where required.
If the research involves animals, authors must confirm that appropriate ethical and welfare standards were followed.
Use of Hazardous Materials
If the study involves hazardous chemicals, procedures, or equipment, authors must clearly identify them in the manuscript.
Fundamental Errors in Published Works
If authors discover a significant error or inaccuracy in their published work, they must promptly notify the editor and cooperate fully in correcting or retracting the publication where appropriate.
Duties of the Publisher
The publisher supports the journal in maintaining ethical editorial practices and scholarly integrity. The publisher is committed to safeguarding editorial independence, ensuring that commercial interests do not influence editorial decisions, supporting editors in handling complaints, appeals, and misconduct allegations, facilitating the publication of corrections, expressions of concern, and retractions when necessary, and preserving the integrity, accessibility, and permanence of the scholarly record. The publisher will not interfere with editorial decisions based on scholarly merit.
Conflicts of Interest Policy
Conflicts of interest may arise when authors, editors, or reviewers have financial, institutional, personal, academic, or professional relationships that could influence, or be perceived to influence, their judgment. Authors must disclose all relevant competing interests in the manuscript. Reviewers must decline invitations where competing interests could affect their impartiality. Editors must recuse themselves from handling manuscripts where competing interests exist. Undisclosed conflicts of interest may lead to editorial action, including rejection, correction, or retraction.
Plagiarism Screening and Similarity Assessment
All submissions may be screened for textual overlap using plagiarism-detection tools or equivalent editorial checks. Similarity reports are used as screening tools only and are not interpreted mechanically. Editorial decisions are based on the nature, extent, and context of overlap. Excessive similarity, unattributed overlap, plagiarism, self-plagiarism, or redundant publication may result in rejection, request for revision, or post-publication action.
Allegations of Research Misconduct
Research misconduct includes, but is not limited to, plagiarism, duplicate publication, fabricated data, falsified data, inappropriate image manipulation, citation manipulation, authorship manipulation, undeclared conflicts of interest, and peer review manipulation.
When allegations of misconduct are raised before or after publication, the journal will assess the concern in a fair, confidential, and evidence-based manner. The editor may request clarification, documentary evidence, or institutional explanation from the author or relevant parties. Where necessary, the journal may consult reviewers, editorial board members, ethics experts, or the authors’ institutions.
If the concern is substantiated, the journal may reject the manuscript, publish a correction, publish an editor’s note or expression of concern, retract the article, or notify the relevant institution or authority when appropriate. The journal follows COPE principles in handling allegations of misconduct.
Complaints and Appeals
The journal provides a mechanism for complaints and appeals relating to editorial decisions, peer review, publication ethics, or editorial conduct.
Appeals Against Editorial Decisions
Authors may appeal editorial decisions if they believe a decision was based on a significant misunderstanding, procedural error, or demonstrable unfairness. Appeals must be submitted in writing with a clear justification and supporting evidence. The journal will review the appeal independently, and the outcome of the appeal will be final.
Complaints About Editorial Process or Publication Ethics
Complaints regarding editorial conduct, peer review, conflicts of interest, or publication ethics should be submitted to the editorial office or Editor-in-Chief. If the complaint concerns the Editor-in-Chief, it will be handled by another designated editor or the publisher to ensure impartiality.
The journal will handle complaints fairly, confidentially, and within a reasonable timeframe.
Corrections and Retractions
The journal is committed to maintaining the accuracy and integrity of the scholarly record. When necessary, the journal may publish post-publication notices linked to the original article.
The following are categories of corrections and post-publication updates to peer-reviewed primary research and review-type articles and certain kinds of non-peer-reviewed article types. Substantial errors to Supplementary Information and Extended Data are corrected similarly to amendments to the main article. Except for Editor’s Notes, all categories below are bi-directionally linked to the original article and indexed.
Author Correction
An author correction may be issued when a significant error introduced by the author affects the accuracy, integrity, or clarity of the published article but does not invalidate the overall findings.
Publisher Correction
A publisher correction may be issued when a significant error introduced during editorial production or publication affects the article’s accuracy, integrity, or record.
Addendum
An addendum may be published when important additional information becomes available after publication and is necessary for readers’ understanding of the article.
Expression of Concern
An expression of concern may be issued when serious concerns have been raised about a published article, but the investigation is ongoing or inconclusive. This notice alerts readers while preserving due process.
Editor’s Note
An editor’s note may be published when the editor considers that readers should be informed about a relevant editorial matter concerning a published article.
Retraction
A retraction may be issued when the findings or integrity of a published article are substantially undermined by major error, fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, unethical research, duplicate publication, or other serious breaches of publication ethics. Retraction notices will state the reason for retraction, identify who is retracting the article where appropriate, and remain linked to the original article. The original article will remain part of the scholarly record but will be clearly marked as retracted.
Removal or Replacement
In exceptional circumstances, such as legal necessity or grave risk to participants, the journal may remove or replace content in accordance with legal and ethical considerations while preserving the transparency of the publication record as far as possible.
When making corrections to articles, in most cases, the original article (PDF and HTML) is corrected and is bi-directionally linked to and from the published amendment notice, which details the original error. For the sake of transparency, when changes made to the original article affect data in figures, tables, or text (for example, when data points/error bars change or curves require redrawing), the amendment notice will reproduce the original data. When it is impossible to correct the original article in both HTML and PDF versions (for example, articles published many years before the error is raised), the article will remain unchanged but contain bi-directional links to and from the published amendment notice.